14 kWh increase = 30 dollar increase truly is mind boggling. Does your electric company charge you for the “transportation” of the electricity in addition to the consumption? Tragically mine does.
They still have you on hand-checked meters out there? We’re on those “smart meters” here (widgets that wirelessly report usage to the power company). I’m not sure how prevalent they are nationwide.
I found myself discussing the merits of kickstarter for anime with some fellow fans and the Anime Sols project came up. The first title that came up with that was Creamy Mami and that only came up because everyone, even those who are in the know, thought that it sounds like a hentai title.
Talk about being memorable for the wrong reasons. 
prices of things arent surprising at all when you consider than most of the 1st word necessities are ran by corporations built on greed. We are just lucky most places have municipal water that keeps the cost down,a nd nobody has found a way to charge for air yet. Food and shelter, the 3rd and 4th required things for human life, carry some of the highest prices because people can get away with charging them.
Welcome to 'Murica, Land of the Greed, and the home of the slave.
With electricity, isn’t it more about power plants being shuttered with not enough new ones being built and the high cost of coal/natural gas/oil used to generate electricity?
Where I am, our local power company was a regulated utility (ie:sanctioned monopoly) but regulation was ended and without any real competition (other energy providers still use the local company’s equipment) they’ve been free to shaft us with no repercussion. Crony capitalism = 
Hydro, Tidal, Wind and Solar all fail to meet our needs but they’re the only ones that seem to be built nowadays. All 4 of them are rather “anti-green” so I wonder how whirling death blades that grind up birds and fish but don’t really provide power are OK but a plant that just puffs out steam and pumps out power isn’t.
[quote=“celestial_being” post=176666]
Hydro, Tidal, Wind and Solar all fail to meet our needs but they’re the only ones that seem to be built nowadays.[/quote]
Do you science much?
[quote=“OneWayDevil” post=176670]
[quote=“celestial_being” post=176666]
Hydro, Tidal, Wind and Solar all fail to meet our needs but they’re the only ones that seem to be built nowadays.[/quote]
Do you science much?[/quote]
Yes. That’s why I’d much rather see more nuclear/gas/coal plants exciting some electrons than what IBM calls “underwater fans that are powered by the Moon”. B)
[quote=“celestial_being” post=176672]
[quote=“OneWayDevil” post=176670]
Do you science much?
Yes. That’s why I’d much rather see more nuclear/gas/coal plants exciting some electrons than what IBM calls “underwater fans that are powered by the Moon”. B)[/quote]
Yea but seriously, do you even science? Hydro, Tidal, Wind, Solar annnd Geothermal are all already showing promising results and have been for years. If in terms of quantity the only reason they fail is because there’s not enough of them.
The problem with renewable or “free” energy sources is that it doesn’t line the power companies pockets or the politicians that they lobby. That is why they are getting nowhere. Same for why it took so long for the electric car that has been around since the 70s. For 40 years the petroleum industry prevented it from being made available to the public so they could milk for every nickel and dime they could get with excuses about why it wouldn’t work, when it worked all along.
Politicians just need to do like they did with DTV when they gave away from digital antennae and get the solar and such into the public’s hands, and watch how fast Duke Energy crumbles, coal mining practically stops, health levels rise, costs of EVERYTHING goes down…
I’d love to tell the power company to go pound sand but even if the government were to give me enough solar panels to cover my whole roof and enough batteries to pack my attic full of 'em then I still don’t see that being practicable. If we had the uber-efficient solar panels that we were promised in The Man Who Sold The Moon, that old Heinlein novel, then things would be different.
Solar/Geothermal/Hydro/Tidal/Wind have two unsolved technical problems: generating more energy when needed (ie:man can’t make the wind blow) and storing the energy made for later consumption. All of those technologies are rather anti-green too.
Personally, I’d like to see more of the methane->electricity plants as those harness a natural gas that is already being produced at landfills and sewage treatment plants and has the advantage of making sewage plants energy independent, which is a huge problem in my area as the plants invariably spew untreated effluent into the waterways when they lose power in storms.
The worst part is that we’re closing, or pushing to close, the conventional power plants that we do have before we have alternatives. I’d like to see a modern nuclear power plant, one that takes advantage of the 40 years of technological advances that we’ve been ignoring.
My electricity bills aren’t that expensive. In the summers, they get up to the $180’s at times, but that’s with multiple air conditioners going. The weird thing is though, that around where I live, we get our power from NYSEG, but the town over gets their power from Con Edison, and have to pay a whole lot more… I guess they just feel like charging more for it. Anyway, I live about 20 miles from Indian Point, so my power better be cheap! 
A lot of people seem to shy away from nuclear power, but for all the bad it can do, it does a lot for powering the world 
There’s a company called TerraPower - Wikipedia that’s working on a type of reactor called a Traveling wave reactor - Wikipedia
Unlike the reactors we use now, which use enriched uranium, Traveling Wave Reactors can run on depleted uranium, and can even run off of the spent fuel from current nuclear plants. Which means we’ve already got fuel enough for power the country for 100s of years. Plus, they can operate for several decades before the fuel needs to be changed.
Bill Gates, who’s probably TerraPower’s biggest investor did a TED Talk on energy a few years back where he talks about Traveling Wave Reactors as well as other forms of energy. Here it is if you want to watch it: http://youtu.be/JaF-fq2Zn7I
[quote=“celestial_being” post=176697]generating more energy when needed (ie:man can’t make the wind blow) and storing the energy made for later consumption. All of those technologies are rather anti-green too.
Personally, I’d like to see more of the methane[/quote]
1a. you do realize there is clothing now that uses your motion to store the energy to run the lighting and such in it right? the cost of power has gone up while its consumption per device has gone down since we no longer use vacuum tubes. dont use CFLC or incandescent lights which take more energy, etc. you have to learn to live with your environment as a people, not jsut use and abuse it.
1b. you realize it costs the environment less to recycle rechargeable batteries than it does for dumps converted to methane wells right? or coal mining?
I hate to burst your bubble, but Ney York city and part of Canada have been powered by hydro-electric power since…electricity. General Electric and Tesla beat out Edison and his DC over lines and created the plant at Niagara.
are you really saying that nuclear waste disposal and ash flows are more environmentally safe than just sitting back and using the sun? Are you John Malone?
the problem is not the tech isn’t green, but the people in charge of the world aren’t because they want the other “green”, the grass that only grows from the BEP and released through the FED.
It’s true that Niagara supplies a lot of electricity to New York City, but Indian Point and Natural Gas plants also supply a good amount.
Point being hydroelectric came before coal and fossil fuel generated electricity. Hoover damn, in the desert powers Vegas.
To claim renewable resource sources don’t work is to be blind from reality.
[quote]
1b. you realize it costs the environment less to recycle rechargeable batteries than it does for dumps converted to methane wells right? or coal mining?[/quote]
As I understand it, the landfills are already producing methane due to the garbage in them rotting and it was normally vented via piping and burned off to prevent an explosion hazard. By piping it into a generator, we get electricity instead of just waste heat.
Storing our nuclear waste in a sealed bunker does sound more green to me (especially if we can reuse it) than those solar plants in the western US that are causing reflections strong enough to literally incinerate birds mid-flight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#Environmental_impacts), a modern-day version of Archimedes’ anti-ship mirrors. Solar also, due to inefficiency, takes a lot more space to generate power than does a nuclear/coal/gas plant.
Going by Wiki, the Ivanpah plant pumps out a constant 377 MW and takes up a whopping 3,500 acres. The Indian Point nuke plant pumps out 2,065 MW and takes up much less space. California recently decommissioned a nuclear power plant that provided even more power than that (San Onofre) and, insanely, the bird-brains in NY want to shutter Indian Point when it would seem that the inefficient solar death ray is what should be shuttered. These ultra-modern solar plants are getting schooled by downright decrepit nuke plants.
With coal, the energy comes pre-stored in a highly efficient storage medium: coal. We can burn more when we need more power and less when we need less power. With solar, we have to build our own storage medium as we only get power from it when the sun shines on the solar plant and our storage media aren’t as efficient as coal/gas/nuclear fuel.
OK, you are misunderstanding and I see what part now. The idea is to get RID of the “power company”, not let them sue solar or whatever, but each person have the ability to get their own power. When they don’t have enough, they need to learn how to manage it. I am not talking about tying to turn Aracebo array into a power station or company, but each home should and can make its own electricy with a combination of the renewable sources out there.
Shutting down those other sources are great. If needed in a time of crisis, they just need to know how to make them work and have people on hand to work them like National Guard or something.
Indian point provides 25% of the power to NYC and Westchester county. Shutting it down would mean having to find a replacement for the 2064 Mwh it produces every day. You would need multiple coal plants to accomplish that. There were people who actually wanted to temporarily shut down the plant for the summer without any plans for making up for the lost power. Nuclear plants may be thought of negatively by many, but nuclear plants are probably one of the best ways to generate enough electricity to power the country. The Hoover dam produces around the same amount of electricity as Indian point does, but unfortunately, you cant just put a hydroelectric plant anywhere you want and expect it to be as effective as the Hoover dam. If they did shut down Indian point, the only thing that could properly replace it would be another nuclear power plant.
Aside from power generation, the entire country’s power grid is so antiquated, some of the infrastructure is decades older than it was designed to last.
I would say the country’s infrastructure is scores older that it was intended to last because people back then only thought about the now, well jsut like everyone now does. Thus why power companies always complain about having downed lines, but never want to bury them to prevent because it would cost too much. Well the cost of things ain’t getting cheaper so when will the excuse for doing things right be over with?
I am just so… SICK of this crap!
I hope this ungodly heat wave ends soon.
12:30pm and it’s already 105.
You’d think they could get a different icon for temps above 100 degrees… maybe a sweating sun.
Anything but that goofy smiling sun.
[quote=“Slowhand” post=176735]You’d think they could get a different icon for temps above 100 degrees… maybe a sweating sun.
Anything but that goofy smiling sun.[/quote]
I would vote for this outfit on the sun at that point. :evil: (IT would then imply that the temperature is hell.)
I love how local has a few different storm icons. one with a lightning bolt in front of some clouds, another with the lightning behind the clouds. What is the difference? Oh and they also just have a lightning bolt with no clouds, which isn’t even possible.